Back in November, I fretted that Lost would suffer from what I dubbed the “endless hit-TV-series death march”:
“Great shows envisioned with tidy, finite story arcs often become unwieldy and bloated once they become profit centers.”
Oh, my prescience! The show’s second season quickly became tedious, entire episodes passing with seemingly nothing happening. By the time last night’s season finale arrived, I was excited to have Wednesday nights back.
My final judgment on the two-hour finish will have to wait until next season, when we’ll quickly find out whether the series’ makers will continue the momentum or bide their time until the next sweeps period. Right now, I’m merely fatigued by the show.
On the one hand, a lot of apparently significant information was revealed last night. On the other hand, the fragmentary nature means that the audience doesn’t yet have the tools to put it into a meaningful context; we are no closer to clear answers than we were a week (or even a year) ago.
Critical, in my estimation, is the acknowledgment that a world outside of – and related (in a planetary sense) to – “the Island” still exists, based on the epilogue.
Perhaps more important was the revelation that the people working for Penny Widmore in the non-Island monitoring station understand that they’re looking for electromagnetic anomalies in their search for Desmond. This suggests knowledge of what the Island is and that Desmond is there. And that in turn suggests that Charles Widmore (Penny’s dad) is intimately involved with whatever’s happening on the Island, and not merely a clueless subcontractor who worked for Hanso/DHARMA.
Then again, given my dismal record of predicting happenings in last night’s episode, you should probably ignore anything I say.
